New O'Keeffe exhibit shows artist's different side

FORT WORTH, Texas 
The elegant Georgia O'Keeffe is known for her large-scale paintings of vibrant flowers and trees, but inspiration for her other works came during many rustic camping trips out West.

That little-known side of O'Keeffe is the focus of a new exhibit at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. It features some never-before-displayed art, photographs, clothing and camping gear - including her tent, sleeping bag, lanterns and cooking utensils - from her time in New Mexico in the 1940s.

"She appreciated nature and felt she had to be close to nature to capture it," said museum curator Tricia Taylor Dixon. "We wanted to show her as a person, a woman and a nature lover, and not just the iconic, distant artist as she was known by most people."

The "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Faraway: Nature and Image" exhibit opens Friday and runs through Sept. 6 at the museum in Fort Worth.

O'Keeffe, who was born in Wisconsin and later studied art in Chicago and New York, may be best known for her watercolor or oil paintings of larger-than-life flowers, leaves and trees.

But she later became inspired by the expansive vistas and vivid landscapes of the West, discovered while living in Texas to teach art in Amarillo schools from 1912-14 and at a college in Canyon a few years later.

She started summer camping trips to New Mexico in 1929 - when she began depicting colorful cliffs, large rocks or desert skulls in her oil paintings - and moved there several years after her husband's death in the 1940s.

"She referred to that as the `faraway,' the romantic idea of open spaces, where she didn't feel as confined as she did in the East," Dixon said. "She definitely captured the Southwest in her art work, especially after 1929."

The 3,500-square-foot exhibit replicates an O'Keeffe campsite in great detail, but it also features nine of her paintings, six sketches and more than two dozen candid photos of her. It includes a few letters she wrote to her husband Alfred Stieglitz, known as the nation's first advocate of modern art, who stayed on the East Coast during her trips.

Even then, O'Keeffe was such an icon that her fellow campers saved her items. They were later carefully preserved - even some firewood, although it could not be used in this exhibit because of deterioration, Dixon said.

The exhibit features art and other items from 1916 to 1949, representing only part of O'Keeffe's eight-decade career. Much is on loan from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., where the exhibit is scheduled to go early next year.

O'Keeffe was inducted into the Cowgirl Museum's Hall of Fame in 1991, five years after her death at age 98. The hall of fame honors artists and writers in addition to rodeo performers, ranchers, entertainers and trailblazers - women whose lives represent the spirit of the American West.